The Line of Polity

12

"In the predawn light Brother Serendipity stood at the bounds of Agatha Compound and turned to address his three companions. 'You have served me well these three days, and should know that in that service you have served God and his Prophet: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand? "

The woman made a slight whimpering sound as she suppressed a laugh. The Brother stood to one side of the tall boundary stone, with his arms spread wide and a beatific expression on his face. The three creatures looked at each other with expressions that were completely unreadable. The gabbleduck then lifted what could loosely be described as a hand up to the side of its head and, with what could equally loosely be described as a finger, scribed circles in the air.

"As the sun rose over the compound. Brother Serendipity said unto his companions, 'You shall come with me to share in this glorious day! "

Now the three creatures moved in around the Brother, almost concealing him with walls of flesh, bone, claws and teeth.

" 'Here, from my trial in the wilderness, I come to claim my birthright. I shall smite the morlocks in their dank caverns and I shall rise up over my brothers and rule from the sky! said the Brother. 'That would be a good place to rule from. said the heroyne, sharpening his beak on the side of the boundary stone, 'This boy could go far' added the siluroyne, sharpening his claws on the other side of the stone. 'Shame' concluded the gabbleduck, whose teeth and claws were always sharp."

The boy didn't get it for a moment, until he saw the picture of the creatures pulling apart the Brother like a piece of naan bread. He then grinned with delight and pointed at the picture.

"Gabbleducked," he asserted, not without a degree of craftiness in his expression.

The woman looked at him warningly, then finished the story.

"And thus our story ends with the moral: You can have your cake and give it away, but never turn your back on a gabbleduck."

The night sky was bright with shooting stars that burned long courses through the oxygen-bereft air. Occasionally, distantly, some larger piece of wreckage would make it to the ground, and there then would be a flash and a boom as of gunfire on a distant battleground.

"Dragon is nothing if not thorough when it decides to destroy something," commented Mika.

"It always works on a huge scale," said Cormac, taking a sip from the tea Gant had made out of a packet he'd found amongst their supplies. Cormac and Mika were sitting on their packs whilst watching this display; Apis stood a little apart from them, his head tilted to the sky; and Gant and the dracoman were out 'taking a little recce', as Gant put it.

Cormac nodded to the Outlinker boy. "You notice how all his hatreds are directed towards the Theocracy here and against Skellor on the Occam, He hasn't had a bad word to say about Dragon, yet the creature destroyed the General Patten and killed many of his kin."

"I had not noticed that," agreed Mika, studying the boy.

"It's an attitude prevalent throughout the Polity — since Samarkand, and probably before, Dragon has been viewed as more a force of nature than a being in its own right. It's too huge and unfathomable for most people to see it otherwise. You might just as well hate a hurricane or a volcano."

"I think I understand that: even with scientific objectivity, one cannot help but feel awe. It is godlike in its power and size, and its rather Delphic communications only make it seem more so. There is also its immortality: you once destroyed one Dragon sphere, yet Dragon still lives," Mika replied.

Apis turned towards them now, and walked back over. As he seated himself on his own pack, Cormac thought that behind his visor the boy looked rather unwell.

"How are you doing?" he asked.

"Gravity," confessed Apis. "This exo damps out most of the effects, but I can still feel it pulling on me. I'm tired, even though I'm not working."

That was not actually what Cormac had been asking about, but he let it ride. "We are all tired," he said. "I'd like to stop for sleep, but…" He gestured at his oxygen bottle.

"Oh," said Mika, glancing at Cormac. "I thought, being an agent, you would have been… adjusted."

Cormac considered that: many people, especially in Earth Central Security, had the function of their bodies adjusted so sleep was, at worst, necessary only for a few hours, and then not every night. When he had been gridlinked, he himself had been such a person. After losing his link, he had then deliberately sacrificed the rest of his augmentations. Blegg, his boss in ECS, had been right about the dehumanizing effects of gridlinking, but had not gone far enough: for in Cormac's opinion all augmentations dehumanized. And, furthermore, Cormac found that with human weaknesses he operated more efficiently. This was actually psychological, and he knew that it too could be adjusted, but he felt that in the end people had to draw the line and decide for themselves just how much they wanted to remain themselves. Because of his previous experience of gridlinking, Cormac did not want to fool with his own mind, so he drew his line long before many others drew theirs.

"No," he said. "I'm not adjusted — and I'm tired."

Mika reached into one of the pockets of the pack she was sitting on and pulled out a reel of drug patches, each one on the same paper backing strip no more than a centimetre wide. Catching the reel Cormac tore off one section, removed the patch, discarded its backing strip, and reached inside his shirt to press it against his torso. Then, holding up the reel, he nodded his head to indicate Apis.

"No," said Mika.

"Why not?" Apis asked.

"Your system is not used to the constant drag of gravity, especially your heart, so using stimulants might be suicidal. Anyway, you probably will not need any sleep. The nanites building up your musculature and adding density to your bones will also be clearing out toxins."

"But I feel tired," Apis protested.

"Psychological," replied Mika, tapping her head with her forefinger.

As the stimulant scoured away the fuzzy coating that seemed to have been thickening over everything for the last few hours, Cormac was glad to have it confirmed that it had, after all, been a good idea to lug along Mika's equipment. He himself had refused to use a nanite booster treatment so that he could handle the higher gravity on Callorum, a treatment that would have required him spending forty hours in a tank. Luckily for Apis, Mika had an interesting device with which she could manufacture nano-machines to her own specifications — a device Cormac was not sure was entirely legal within the Polity — and those specifications, he had since learnt, owed much to her study of the hybrid Skellor had created. The Outlinker himself now had a few varieties of those machines beavering away inside him, building muscle, bone, and all those other structures required for a body to handle gravity. Of course, Mika had to make only one mistake and they might end up having to pour Apis out of his exo-skeleton. However, the alternative was that the point eight gee on this planet would kill him over time. Thus far the only detrimental result of this treatment was that the boy was forever hungry. Cormac watched him as he fingered the touch-pad on his neck ring, to draw his visor down into his chin rest so he could begin stuffing another meal bar into his mouth.

"If I'd known there'd be such a celebration of our arrival, I'd have put on my dress uniform," said Gant, striding out of the darkness with Scar at his side.

"I don't think the Theocracy have anything to celebrate at present, and I think they'll find this particular firework display rather costly," said Cormac.

Gant came to a halt with his APW cradled across his chest and nodded at the sky behind them. "You seen that?"

Cormac glanced round but could see nothing else of note, but then the flute grass stood in a tangle two metres tall there, so blocked out most of the starlit sky. He stood up, Mika and Apis also, and they all quickly saw to what Gant referred.

"I think this was what I missed on Samarkand, wasn't it?" said the Golem.

Cormac glanced at him, trying to read something in his expression. Yes, on Samarkand… Gant had never got to see this. He'd been ripped apart, underground, less than an hour before Dragon had appeared in the sky — as it had done here.

The latest 'moon' of Masada was a small reddish-grey penny in the dark sky, nowhere near as impressive as the descending giant Calypse, or the moon Amok that was following it down — that was until you tried to grasp the fact that this was a living creature.

"What, now, do you think?" said Gant.

"Indeed," Cormac replied.

Apis looked at the two of them, his expression showing stubborn anger. "You never tell me anything," he protested.

Cormac was pleased at such a reaction — it was better than the kind of dead efficiency the lad had heretofore displayed.

He explained, "Dragon has probably destroyed every laser array up there, but we think it unlikely it's now just going to meekly sail away into the sunset. That creature is a very large imponderable… so to speak."

"Perhaps it's going to die… like it said," Apis suggested.

"Or live," Gant added.

"Or do both," said Mika. They all turned to look at her, and she went on, "Well, it didn't seem able to make up its mind as to exactly what it was going to do."

"Quite," said Cormac, and was about to go on when suddenly Scar snarled, his eyes fixed on the sky. They all turned back to observe Dragon.

"It's moving," said Gant.

Cormac could not tell for sure, but then he did not have Gant's eyes. He glanced at Scar. "What's happening, Scar — or do I mean Cadmus? What's Dragon going to do next?"

"Dragon is coming," announced Scar.

They gazed back up at it and could now see clearly that it was moving. Dropping lower and lower, it grew larger and larger, clouds of vapour boiling around it, then flashes of orange fire, so that soon it looked like the open circular mouth of a furnace. Distantly, at first, there came to them a steady thunderous grumbling that grew in volume. Cormac gazed around, wondering where they could run for safety, but there was nowhere — if this gigantic sphere was coming down on where they stood then they had no chance at all of getting away. Once again, he resumed the view he had taken aboard the landing craft: if Dragon wanted to kill them, then there was little in these circumstances that they could do about it.

Lower now in the heavens it revealed the vast storm of fire behind it — a wake that continued to boil out in a wide V to cover half the sky.

"It'll come down about fifty kilometres away," said Gant. As a Golem, he possessed the ability to range the creature and work out its angle of descent and its relative velocity.

In the clouds behind and over the surface of the leviathan, forks of lightning flickered, and occasional gunshot discharges hit the ground. The grumbling had become a roar and the ground began to vibrate in sympathy.

"Suicide?" Cormac wondered.

"It's not coming down completely freefall — must be using AG," Gant replied.

At the last it almost seemed to dip, to slam down in the distance, and the fiery cloud of its wake rolled on, blasting up dark clouds and weird vortices of flame.

"On the ground," ordered Cormac.

They flung themselves down with their heads sheltered behind their packs — being the only barrier between themselves and what was coming. The ground shuddered and rocked, and it seemed the whole vast plain dropped a few metres before rising back into position. The roaring increased in volume, then the hurricane was upon them. The flute grass flattened before the blast, and for a short time the air above was filled with long stems and papery fragments, these skirling a hideous dirge as they hurtled past. Then came earth, smoke, and a further rippling of the ground. As this blast-wave passed, it tried to suck them into its wake. After a few minutes, it died and broke into random eddies and the occasional mini-tornado that played strange music with still unbroken stems of grass. In time, they were able to stand up and view the devastation of the flattened plain — and the distant funeral pyre. Scar, tilting his head to the sky, let out a long and mournful howl. Cormac wondered if this was for Dragon… or for something Dragon had done.

Soldiers were revving up the engines of the few machines that would be of use on the surface, and checking weapons that seemed in pristine condition. Thorn had slept, despite the cacophony that seemed only to grow since the destruction of the arrays. Then, upon waking to discover Stanton and Jarvellis gone with soldiers to unload Lyric II, he made his way to Lellan's control room where, after the guards finally let him through, he found further frenetic activity.

"You have to understand that we are just as unprepared for this as they are," said Lellan, during a brief pause when people weren't approaching her for orders, explanations, even comfort, as the military machine she had built reconfigured itself for these strange circumstances. "There's a few units of the Theocracy military on the surface, but mostly it's the proctors, and they only possess limited armament."

"The arrays," said Thorn. "What else would they have needed?"

"Exactly," said Lellan, nodding. "On the surface they only have hand weapons, aerofans, a few military carriers and armoured cars, and limited antipersonnel weapons. For more than a century they've had no need for heavy armour, missile launchers, or anything with more punch than a hand grenade. Why bother with anything else when in a minute you can summon a satellite laser strike accurate and powerful enough to take out anything bigger than an aerofan?"

Fethan, who had only then arrived, interjected, "About four of the arrays were accurate enough to target and take out single individuals, but the Theocracy never bothered — it meant using a huge amount of power, and when was there ever a single individual offering a sufficient threat to 'em?"

Thorn glanced at him, noticed the girl Eldene walking a pace behind him, the pulse-rifle hung from a strap over her shoulder, obviously an unfamiliar weight to her. To Lellan he said, "Surely that makes it all a lot easier for you?" He had already guessed the answers Lellan might give him, but wanted confirmation.

"Well," she said, "we never bothered building any armoured vehicles or any launchers that could not be carried by a man, for the same reasons — the arrays could just take them out. All our forces are kitted essentially for guerrilla warfare, and that kit is limited in quantity — we never expected to be in a position to take all our forces to the surface at once."

"Bastards woulda used the arrays at leisure," said Fethan.

"Can you take the surface with what you have?" Thorn asked.

"Yes, only to lose it again," Lellan replied. Thorn studied her queryingly. "Charity," she went on, "is just a great big training camp for the military. It's spun over to one gee, so the fifty thousand active troops there are training in gravity higher than we have down here. So there's them, and they can come down in landers at any time. With the big ships of the fleet down, they can unload launchers and tanks, and in the end, if all else fails, they can bombard us from orbit with atomics."

"Seems no-win," admitted Thorn.

"In the end it's down to Polity intervention, and we've always known that. The guy at the bottom of a well with a bag of rocks is always gonna lose to the guy at the top," said Fethan.

"It's a balancing act," said Lellan. "We want to capture the surface for long enough to get the ballot over eighty per cent, and then to ask for help from the Polity. We need to create enough disorder so that the Polity can justifiably intervene, but not so much that the Theocracy are forced to go nuclear."

"Never clear-cut, is it?" said Thorn.

"No," said Lellan, moving away with the latest group dressed in camouflage fatigues who had demanded her attention. "Always dirty, and infected."

Thorn now turned to Fethan and Eldene. "And probably deeper and dirtier than even she knows," he muttered, stepping past them to Polas, who had been listening in to their conversation whilst keeping half an eye on his consoles and screens. It seemed that most of the tasks required from him at present he was managing to automate.

"I want to see that recording again," Thorn said, resting a hand on the back of Polas's chair.

Polas glanced up from his instrumentation and eyed him dubiously. "They say you're ECS," he said. "Were you sent here to help us, or just make fruitless inquiries?"

"I wasn't sent. I ended up here by accident," Thorn replied.

Polas raised an eyebrow as he opened a box underneath the console and from it removed a computer disc, which he shoved into a slot in the console. Again, on one of the screens before him, the recent events that had occurred above played out.

"Stop it there," said Thorn, and Polas froze on the image of wreckage hurtling away from the dispersing explosion. "Can you move backwards slowly with this set-up?"

"We're not entirely primitive here," said Polas.

Flickering, the image jerked back in frames: wreckage reversed back into a brightening explosion as the laser array re-formed.

"There," said Thorn. "That came out of Dragon."

Polas squinted at the screen, and adjusted the image back, and they saw for certain an object spat from Dragon just before the creature's strike on the laser array. He now moved the image back and forth until the object was at its most visible. "We should be able to close in on that and clean it up a bit," he said. He opened his box of discs and sorted through them. Finally selecting one, he held down two buttons while removing the recording and replacing with the new disc he selected. The image remained in place and a grid flicked up to cover it. Using a ball control, he adjusted the grid to centre the object in one of the grid's squares. Pressing down the control, he called up a target cursor in the corner of the screen, and then zeroed it on that square.

"Here we go," he said, pressing down the control again to select.

The image broke apart, then the one from the selected co-ordinates began to re-form in small squares across the entire screen. After a moment, a blurred and vaguely rectangular shape became evident. With the computer chuntering away, and each of the squares breaking and re-forming into smaller pixels, the image became steadily clearer.

Before it had completely re-formed Polas said, "Military lander."

"Theocracy?" Thorn asked.

Polas nodded.

Thorn studied the image as it continued to clear. "Now what was Dragon doing with that?"

Polas shrugged and, as the computer finished its work, he used the ball control to pull up a menu and save the same image.

"Any idea where it came down?" Thorn asked.

"I might be able to find out," said Polas, gazing down at his open box of discs, "if it crossed any of our viewing stations. It'll take some time, though."

"Please do so — this might be important. I'm sure Lellan would be as interested to know who was in that craft as am I."

Even though it was quite likely Dragon could have snatched a Theocracy craft on the way here, perhaps to seek information, perhaps just for the hell of it, it seemed odd to Thorn that it had then released it in one piece — especially after seeing what Dragon did to the laser arrays.

At last, in a moment of calm, Carl paused while staring at the forward screen display, and tried to absorb the fact that a circumstance more unlikely than the most extreme he had trained for had now come about. This ground tank — like the other nineteen possessed by the Underground, part of an apocalyptic scheme thought up by Lellan's predecessor — had been retained only for use in the tunnels in the event of an underground attack. No one had even considered the possibility that it might be used on the surface, except perhaps that same predecessor. Carl remembered him as a strange little man who, after raising Lellan to the position she now occupied, had shuffled off to hang himself in Pillar-town Two. His scheme back then had apparently been a mass breakout to kidnap the Hierarch during one of his periodic visits, and he had only scrapped it because the said dignitary had ceased to visit the surface.

The tanks to either side of Carl — three in all, since the others had long since gone to other break-out caverns — were already belching steam from their exhausts as hydrogen turbines wound up to speed. On the surface these would cease to function in the oxygen-bereft atmosphere, but by then they would no longer need the huge torque output of the engines, and could go back onto battery drive.

Glancing back, Carl saw that the rest of his crew was ready: Beckle on the heavy pulse-cannon only recently installed; Targon on the medkit, replacement duty, and just about everything else; and Uris on logistics and navigation. After listening to the communication that came direct to his comlink, he announced to them, "Lellan says time to give them their wake-up call."

"I was hoping to put them to bed," said Beckle, fiddling with the adjustments inside his targeting visor.

Carl reached out and clicked over the switches that started the turbines and immediately they began to cycle their way up to speed — the tank vibrating and groaning like some waking monster. Ahead, the first tank turned towards their exit tunnel, its treads flaking up stone from the floor.

"We're still in tunnel seven?" he asked.

"Confirmed, tunnel seven," said Uris. "Gets us into the centre of the coming shit storm."

Gripping the control column, Carl engaged the turbine and eased the tank forwards, as he had earlier done during the infrequent practice sessions with this machine. It still seemed almost insane to him that they were heading for the surface. With the laser arrays functioning, there had always been small windows of opportunity they could use for a surface attack, outside of which their losses immediately soared above ninety per cent. Never, though, had there been a window large enough to drive a tank through, so to speak — it seemed almost unnatural.

"What's our target?" Beckle asked.

"Nothing from Lellan yet on that," Carl replied.

"It'll be either the Agatha or Cyprian compounds," said Uris. "They're the nearest ones with a military presence."

"Both have auto gun towers, and both have over three thousand troops in situ," said Beckle, probably wondering if the pulse-cannon was enough.

"Confirmed on Agatha compound," said Uris. "Full plan feeding across." He studied his readouts in silence for a moment before continuing with, "Four towers and, at last count, three thousand five hundred troops. We hit this tower at 0.33 from mark time."

Carl glanced at the map screen before him, as the coordinates came up. He then concentrated on where he was going — T-2, 3, and 4 ahead of him now motoring up into the darkness of tunnel seven.

Uris went on, "After we've taken down the tower, we're to hit anything that comes out by air until things get too hot, then head towards Cyprian to rendezvous with Group Two at second co-ordinates, and head north. Holman is even now mining the area underneath second co-ordinates, where it's projected the Theocracy ground troops from both bases will meet."

"How many should that net us?" Carl asked.

"Estimated thirty per cent casualty rate," Uris replied.

"That could mean two thousand dead people," said Targon, who often acted as their conscience as well.

Glancing across at him, Uris said, "More than that when we turn back and hit them again while they're still reeling. With any luck there won't be enough of them left to scrape up with a spade."

The tanks ahead, now going onto the straight upslope, were closing in their two wide treads, which had until then been necessarily apart for steering purposes. Carl operated the control to set his tank doing likewise, turned on the tank's side-lights, and watched as the lead tank hit the earthen wall at which the tunnel terminated. Now with its treads closed to form a continuous belt, that tank opened its tread dips and began to plough its way through. Once up on the surface, the treads opened out again for steering and fast manoeuvring, but Carl had to wonder if, even with their light foamed-metal construction, they would be able to proceed on that surface without sinking.

"What about the infantry? When do they go in?" asked Beckle.

"That old tunnelling machine with the compacter and plascrete spraying arms'll be following us directly, so the tunnel should be ready about an hour after we hit the towers. Infantry'll be coming up then, to take the bases," explained Uris.

"Then where for us?" inquired Beckle.

Uris did not reply — he just looked at Carl, who glanced round at him briefly before replying to the question they all wanted an answer to.

"You know how it is — it depends on exactly what they've got on the surface," he said. "We get proctors or army running around with smart hand-launchers, then we're back to foot-slogging. These bastard lumps of metal make easy targets." He slapped the control console before him, and did not add that Lellan would tell them to abandon only once losses in the tank section grew higher than the gains — and with only twenty tanks to lose, those were odds Carl did not care to study too closely.

Loman did not know whether to feel relief, anger or sadness. Yes, Behemoth had destroyed every one of the laser arrays, killing thousands of good men and breaking the Theocracy's steel grip on the population below, but Faith, Hope and Charity were still intact, and the creature had crashed itself into the surface of the planet. And, now it was gone, there was only the unnecessary chanting of the Septarchy Friars filling the upper channels, when those same channels could be so useful to him.

"All the traders pulled out as fast as they could. They knew what would happen: breakouts all the way across," said Aberil as, accompanied by a party of armed guards, they disembarked down a grav-plated gantry into the tower of Faith. "That godless bitch won't be able to field all her forces, but she should have enough."

"It is a time of change," said Loman, not greatly interested in what he was hearing. "We have been given this opportunity to write clean scripture." Noticing the cold assessing look he got from Aberil, he said no more, for he felt very deeply that the said new scripture would not be what any of the Theocracy, including his brother, would expect. Almost like probing the cavity in a tooth, he felt his mind drawn to the place Behemoth had attempted to occupy in the network of augs, but there he found only chanting — always the chanting of the Septarchy Friars. He drew back, and focused on his surroundings, as they finally arrived at the floor containing the previous Hierarch's luxurious apartments. With a thought, Loman instructed the guards to spread out and take position throughout the outer building before he sent the code that opened the grape-wood doors through his aug. Gesturing for Aberil to follow, he entered, instructing the doors to close behind them, then reluctantly returned his thoughts to the immediate and prosaic, as he faced his brother. "What of our forces on the surface?"

"They'll hold for maybe two days. After that, Lellan and her traitors will have control."

"We could use the fleet to bombard them from orbit," Loman suggested.

Aberil shook his head. "Much as the idea appeals, that would mean our effectively losing the surface of the planet. The only weapons the fleet possesses for direct bombardment from orbit are atomics, and Lellan's forces are already well into the croplands and getting near to the city and spaceport." He hesitated. "Though, should circumstances permit…"

Loman walked to one of the long overstuffed sofas and sank down upon it. "Then what do you suggest, brother?" he asked.

Aberil replied, "Our soldiers have spent time enough in Charity, training for Amoloran's ridiculous schemes. Their purpose has always been military landing and limited ground warfare. So let's use them for that."

"There will be objections," said Loman. "Many would call this a police action and beneath the dignity of soldiers who were essentially trained to attack the Polity."

"Then by their objections they will reveal themselves as showing loyalty to a dead Hierarch rather than to yourself — and to God. The soldiers themselves will not object, and they are the most important factor. Other objectors — perhaps some of the officers coming from the high families — can visit the steamers should they feel their objection strongly enough. But I suspect they won't."

Loman studied his brother as he stood with his hands slack at his sides, and his expression and entire mien without animation. "Very well," said Loman, "I gave you the title First Commander, and now you will use it. Get your men out of Charity and down to the surface. Use them to destroy our enemies." Sending to the doors again Loman had them already opening behind his brother. The fleeting expression that crossed Aberil's face was almost like pain, as he turned abruptly and departed. Loman watched the doors close again, and once more reached out across the realms of the Gift and wondered how closely he could grasp control of them and make them his own, as he had done in this physical realm.

With something of bemusement, Thorn sat himself down in the rim of a huge balloon tyre belonging to one of the ATVs, and removed the helmet of his uniform, dropping it over the barrel of the pulse-rifle he had already propped against the tyre. The infantry — mustering to follow the four tanks once this nearby tunnel was ready — were similarly armed and uniformed as himself. Thorn was reminded of like occasions in his past, even before his Sparkind days, and before he had removed his uniform and sloughed away some of the apparent clean morality of straight face-to-face combat. Within him was the temptation to just go with these men and women, to shrug at responsibility and just obey orders, but he could not do that. His Sparkind training and his subsequent training as an ECS agent had made him, surprisingly, more moral, and more inclined to look for the really dirty jobs to do. It had also been his experience that they were never too difficult to find.

"Agent Thorn, reply please."

The voice from the helmet was tinny, but recognizably that of Polas, the man in the rebels' operations room. Thorn again donned the helmet, levering its side-shield, with contained transceiver and other military tech, down into position.

"Thorn here," he spoke into the mike just to one side of his mouth.

"I've sent those co-ordinates you required. They'll be in there as message number six. All other messages relate to the ground attack."

"Okay," said Thorn, reaching up and pressing one of the touch-pads on the side-shield. With a low whir, a rose-tinted visor slid down from the rim of the helmet. On one side of this, a menu was displayed in the glass.

"Cursor," Thorn said, and a red dot appeared at the centre of his vision, and tracked with the subsequent movement of his eyes. Looking to the menu he selected Messages, and kept one eye closed until the dot flashed into a cross. Upon opening his eye, ten messages were displayed, but rather than go to the one Polas had sent he opened some others at random. The message 'Medtech personnel are reminded that ajectant will be available from the manufactories now being set up in PA fourteen, and that all ATV ambulances must carry at least four cartons for distribution amongst the surface workers' he thought was in amusing counterpoint to 'Second and third hand-assault weapons are now available in PA twelve — these are for distribution amongst those field workers prepared to fight. It seemed that the cargo being unloaded from Lyric II had brought succour and death in equal proportions. He now went to message six: 'Lander came down at these co-ordinates'. Thorn ignored the co-ordinates and went straight to the Go to Map prompt below it. The craft had come down in the wilderness two hundred kilometres from this particular cavern, and though the map was detailed, the contour lines, colours, and biblical names gave him no idea of what might lie between him and it.

"Trooper Thorn," said a grating voice.

"Off," said Thorn, and the visor snapped back up into his helmet. He looked up at the old Golem, Fethan, behind whom stood the girl Eldene. Both of them wore the same combat gear as himself. He noted that the girl's fingers were white on her pulse-rifle, as if she was frightened that someone might take it away from her. Thorn doubted this — he had already seen kindergarten infantry troops younger than her.

"That's something I haven't been called in a while," said Thorn at last.

"Something you were called, though," said Fethan.

Thorn stood up from the rim of the balloon tyre and inspected him. That Fethan was a machine had been evident from the first — him being the only one of Lellan's party not requiring breathing apparatus — but Thorn was now beginning to wonder just what sort of machine Fethan really was. He did not move with that seemingly obdurate disconnection from his surroundings that was the hallmark of all Golem — even the newer ones. Sometimes it was difficult to spot them but Thorn was trained to it and had been used to working with such constructs for much of his life. Fethan, though, moved with more connection to his surroundings — as if he knew what it was to have to breathe, to feel his own heartbeat, to know real pain and real pleasure, and not some emulation of it.

"What are you?" Thorn asked abruptly.

Fethan grinned, exposing the gap in his front teeth.

He held up two fingers. "I'll give you two guesses."

Thorn considered what those two guesses should be. "Either you're a memplant loading to a Golem shell, or you're a cyborg. I would guess at the latter."

"Correct first time," said Fethan, lowering his hand.

"Then," said Thorn hesitantly, "you have been around for a while. I don't think anyone has gone cyborg for the last hundred years."

"Maybe," Fethan replied, obviously reluctant to volunteer further information about his own history. "Now, tell me, you're going to find out what's going on with this lander Dragon was carrying, ain't you?"

"I had considered that," said Thorn cautiously.

Fethan stepped close to one side of Thorn and slapped a hand down onto the thick foamed-neoprene tyre of the ATV.

"Then we'll be needing one of these," he said.

"I don't think Lellan would appreciate one of these vehicles being taken and, incidentally, what's your interest?"

"Lellan's interest, in fact. She took to heart your comments about Dragon, and she wants to be certain it's dead. I'm to head out there to make sure. And where Dragon came down is not far from where that craft came down. Two birds with one stone you might say."

"Yeah, you might," Thorn replied.

The autogun tower opened up with a staccato rattling, and Proctor Molat swore unremittingly after jumping up startled and banging his bald pate on the corner of his office cupboard. It took him a moment to realize just what he was hearing, as the last time those guns had fired had been during a test, so long ago, Molat recollected, that he still had thick black hair on his head. Flipping up his breather mask he rounded his desk — his feelings about leaving the stack of paperwork there, and the reasons for leaving it, somewhat ambivalent — yanked open the sealed door, and stepped out into the grey day. Only to have that day turned terribly bright when the autogun tower disintegrated in a ball of light.

"Muster!Muster!" commander Lurn bellowed over aug channels. "We are under attack!"

Proctor Molat grimaced at that: how incredibly observant of Lurn. He glanced over to where some soldiers were setting up a gun on the embankment to the right of the burning tower, and observed aerofans spiralling up into the air in the eastern section of the compound, shortly followed by Lurn's two carriers. Arms fire crackled in the air, and other explosions blossomed in the compound as Lurn's forces ran for the embankments, whilst his own armoured vehicles trundled from garages they should have abandoned, in Molat's opinion, as soon as the laser arrays had been destroyed.

"Molat here," he said over the Proctor's channel. "That you up there, Voten?"

"It is, sir," replied his lieutenant.

"What do you see?"

"Four heavily armoured tanks coming in from the east."

Molat flinched as a wall blew nearby, and something that might once have been a soldier bounced across the ground. Attempting to retain some dignity, he continued walking to where he had last left his own aerofan. Climbing inside it and initiating the lift control, he went on, "What kind of armament? Anything we haven't got?"

"All looks fairly standard to me," replied Voten.

Within a few seconds, Molat was high enough to see for himself. He watched one of the tanks spin on its wide treads and spit out a missile that blasted a hole through the earthen embankment, incidentally burying one of Lurn's armoured cars and the small field-gun it was towing. It had always been Molat's worry that when the rebels finally did do something big, it would be with advanced Polity weapons. He was considering how little different was the armament on these tanks from that of Lurn's own forces, when a pulse-cannon opened up from the lead tank down there. To his right he saw one of Lurn's carriers tilt in the air as one corner of it blew away, then slewed sideways and down to obliterate a barracks building. The blue fire continued to stab upwards, and with merciless accuracy began to nail aerofan after aerofan.

Molat hit rapid descent and watched in horror as the fire tracked across towards himself. There was a flash, a sound that seemed to tear his eardrums, and he was clinging to the rail as his aerofan plummeted, tilted sideways, the motor making a horrible whickering noise as of a horse being led to slaughter, and the fans setting up a teeth-rattling vibration as they went off balance. Black smoke was pouring from under the cowling, and the coils were spitting out tendrils of St Elmo's fire. He glimpsed a tank right underneath him, then mud, something belching black smoke, then flute grass. It wasn't instinct that made him jump, just the sure knowledge, from long experience of flying those unstable machines, that either a motor or a fan was about to fly apart.

There seemed to him only half a second before he crashed through flute grass, hit the ground, and penetrated the surface. Up to his waist in the mud below the rhizomes, he glanced back just in time to see his aerofan arc up and suddenly slam down nearby. He was congratulating himself on having survived, when one of the abandoned craft's fans went completely out of balance and disintegrated. Something smashed Molat in the back of his head, almost hauling him out of the ground again before depositing him face-first back into it.

"Any activity?" asked Lellan.

Studying the screen showing a picture transmitted by the probe they had initially sent up to observe Dragon, Polas very quickly and coldly replied, "Fleet ships just out from Charity and taking on landing craft and troops."

Lellan allowed herself to feel some relief — perhaps, she thought, this was the relief of the condemned upon discovering it would be the cage rather than the spring pinning over the flute-grass rhizomes. Had that fleet come direct to the planet, without stopping to take ground forces and the means to get them down to the surface, she knew that they would have been in for nuclear bombardment. Such a possibility remained, but it was now just that little bit more remote.

"Did you get that, John?" she asked.

From Lyric II, it was Jarvellis who replied, "John's already on his way, Lellan. I'd comlink you through to him, but I know he doesn't like any more of a distraction than having me speaking to him."

"Just so long as he does what is required," said Lellan.

"Have you known him to do any less?" Jarvellis asked.

"Very well," Lellan went on, "what about the transmitter?"

"The U-space transmitter is up and running, and you can patch through at any time. What do you want to do: send your megafile?"

"Yes — send it now."

"Okay, it's on its way," Jarvellis replied. "What about the realtime broadcasts?"

"As soon as you get a reply on the megafile, liaise with Polas and go to realtime. Polity AIs will know what's going on and how best to deal with the information. The ballot we won't get up until the compounds have been taken, but we'll send that as soon as possible."

Lellan cut the connection. There had been no real decision to make: the file documenting two hundred years of Theocracy atrocities, with its depositions and sealed tamper-proof holocordings, would go first, to give News Services and Polity AIs something to get their metaphorical teeth into. The viewing time of that file was something in the region of five thousand hours, but it seemed likely that the first viewers of it — being Polity AIs — would not take so long. Then, as soon as it had been safely received, the rebels would go realtime and ask outright for Polity intervention — their request reinforced by the ballot. But that was for the future; right now she had a battle to organize. She turned her attention back to the screens before her.

"Carl, that was quick — or do you have a problem?" she asked, observing the pattern of dots spread across a map showing the inhabited area of the continent.

"All somewhat quicker than expected," Carl replied. "They put their aerofans and carriers up straight away, and we took them down with the pulse-cannon. They're now coming after us with a few ground-cars and infantry."

"Our losses?"

"None. I think we caught them well untrousered — but that won't last."

Lellan studied closely the dots on the maps, the constant readouts and battle stats. One tank had been blown at Cyprian compound, and a further two north of the spaceport. They were doing better than expected but, as expected, were now encountering real resistance from the old fortifications around the city. Lellan swore and stood up.

She turned to Polas. "Take over here, Polas, and keep relaying through to my console on the carrier." Then, before Polas could voice any objections, "What's the minimum time we have before their landers start coming in?"

Polas glanced at his screens. "If the fleet left now, which it shows no sign of doing just yet, then they'd be landing on the day after tomorrow. I'd still reckon on that, as I don't think they'll delay much longer."

Molat hauled himself up out of sticky mud as slowly as he could, wondering if he dared reach round and touch the back of his head — scared he would find broken bone and touch living brain with his filthy fingertips. Even this deliberate slowness was too fast, and the ringing in his ears rolled back down his spine, stamping on every nerve on the way. He vomited into his crumpled mask, choked as he tore it away from his face, and fumbled for another from the container on the side of his oxygen bottle. With the second mask finally in place, he carefully eased himself to his knees then attempted to stand. What had happened meanwhile? Was the battle over? Surrounded by tall flute grass and with the continued ringing in his ears drowning out any other sound, he had no way of telling for sure. Looking at his watch he saw that he'd been unconscious for maybe twenty minutes, and turning in what he hoped was the right direction, he began to trudge for home. The tank which loomed suddenly ahead of him, flattening flute grass, he had no time to identify as friend or enemy before it knocked him backwards, and its foamed titanium tread crushed Molat into the ground. Maybe he screamed — he never got time to hear.

A fine grey mist filtered down from the spraying machine, until the circular airtight door closed behind it. Behind the door, Thorn could hear the machine moving towards the surface, with the thumping of its compacters and the roar of its plascrete sprayers as it consolidated the tunnels — initially opened by the tanks, but prone to collapse — into a more permanent structure. The plascrete smell remained acrid as the chemical reactions took place in the settling mist on his side of the door. If he had not kept his breather mask up, Thorn knew he would be coughing and choking by now, his lungs nicely lined with grey epoxy — perfectly preserved but utterly unable to function.

Stomping back out of the tunnel entrance, he observed the infantry now seated separately in their various squads, ready to head for the surface. Lacking in heavy armour and large transports, the conveyances these troops used were crude antigravity sleds with impeller fans mounted on the back — and not many of those either. He suspected these jury-rigged vehicles were mainly for the rapid transit of troops and equipment to reach a target, whereupon the rest of the battle would entail a footslog.

No one was checking weapons now, he noticed — that had been done enough times already — and most had their visors down whilst they read the updates on the battles that were taking place above. As the troops finally began to stand up and shoulder their packs and weapons, Thorn checked his helmet screen and realized that Lellan had given the order to move out. Shouldering his own weapon, he rejoined Fethan and Eldene at the ATV.

"Let's get moving, shall we?" he suggested.

The girl, he noticed, was still white-knuckling her pulse-rifle, watching the infantry depart with a kind of unfocused determination. He rested a hand on her shoulder.

"You ever driven one of these?" he asked.

She stared at him. "No."

"Then it's time for you to learn." He gestured on ahead of him.

Fethan gave Thorn a nod of acknowledgement before following her inside the ATV. After glancing at the gathered infantry, Thorn followed him on board. She could, he was well aware, have served as mere fodder for the infantry war that was sure to ensue once the imbalance of missiles to flying machines was levelled out and everyone was grounded, since it hardly required much in the way of an education to pull a trigger, whether that trigger was electric or mechanical. But for some reason the cyborg had formed an attachment to this young girl. It was one that Thorn felt he could understand; he'd seen the mess a rail-gun slug made of a human body, and that mess was never proportional to the victim's innocence.

The inside of the ATV was designed without flourish with the same stark utility as its exterior. The raised hump in the middle of the single cabin formed the cowling for the large H and O engine, and it was flat on top to serve as a table, a work-bench, or a surgeon's slab. The front screen consisted of three panes of tough plastic imbedded with a grid of wires, above a simple navigational console, a steering column, and pedals for hydrostatic drive and brakes. There was one seat only in front of this, the seat and targeting visor for the two gun turrets located at the back of the vehicle being set midway down the cabin. Along the other walls were drop-down seats and stowage lockers. It seemed that no space was wasted, and that the interior of this vehicle was designed primarily as a field surgery — the autodoc stowed in a perspex case at the back offering sure proof of this. Thorn felt guilty about Fethan commandeering this vehicle, but felt sure that if it had been truly indispensable Lellan would not have allowed him to have it. He suspected that this particular wheeled vehicle had been superseded by more modern AG transports, built around the grav-motors which the likes of Stanton and Jarvellis had been smuggling in, and also that this vehicle — designed for travelling underground — was now considered too slow.

Demonstrating the use of the controls to Eldene, Thorn noted that they had not been quick enough in heading for the tunnel entrance, as already it was blocked by the infantry on the move in that direction. They advanced in neat lines at a steady jog, towing the grav-sleds along by handles mounted on their sides. No doubt these troops would climb on only when they reached the surface, and only then start up the fans. Glancing back, he observed Fethan checking out the gun turret's control and visor. Soon, after only a couple of lurches to begin with, Eldene had the ATV rolling in behind the departing infantry. It was perhaps twenty minutes later that she actually drove into the tunnel entrance.

With the hydrostatic drive in operation there were no awkward gear changes to make for handling the slope — the vehicle did that automatically — and shortly they were approaching the now open door, which had earlier been closed while the spraycrete machine did its work. This door had been placed across at the dividing line formed by the chalk layer between limestone and soil. Once they were through it, Thorn watched, on the rear-view screen, the three sections of the door irising closed. Two minutes later, they rolled out onto churned mud, green with unearthed nematodes and crushed vegetation, all scattered with torn-up mats of rhizomes. The abandoned spraying and compacting machine lay to one side, its tank empty and its spraying arms locked in an upright position like the forelimbs of a threatened tarantula. All around them, infantry were clambering onto the fan-driven sleds, which were starting up in a concert of roars that filled the air with a haze of grass fragments and a mist of slurry.

"Take us south and get the display map up on that side screen, like I showed you. Polas has already transferred both sets of co-ordinates across, so they should show," said Thorn.

Eldene turned on the side screen and, using a ball control to move the cursor, selected Maps from the menu displayed. While she pulled back on the initial map, to bring up the co-ordinates of the area where Dragon and the escape craft had fallen, Thorn gazed through the front windscreen at distant flashes and plumes of dust and smoke. Even here, in this airtight vehicle, he could hear the sounds of distant explosions and feel vibration through the ground. Soon Eldene had the ATV heading in the direction they wanted — into battle, unfortunately, but from the lights everywhere in the sky it seemed there was no direction that took them away from it.

For a second time Molat hauled himself out of sticky mud, and again changed his mask. He turned to watch the tank continue on its way and, with a kind of lunatic logic, was completely unsurprised that this second dunking had somehow restored his hearing. To either side of him there were other vehicles growling through the grasses, and he realized that these were Lurn's force going in pursuit of the enemy's tanks. He considered trudging after them, then decided that two near-death experiences in one day had been quite enough for him, so turned to head back towards Agatha compound. Anyway, he was religious police — leave warmongering to the soldiers.

Trudging through churned mud and broken rhizomes, he observed dead soldiers and splashes of blood across the flute grass. He felt no sympathy with the men who had died — they not being proctors but military — and anyway he found it difficult to sympathize with anyone else at the best of times. But now, with his entire body one great ache, his aerofan destroyed, and his uniform muddy, burnt and ripped, what he needed was to get back to base, get himself washed and changed, and back onto… gunfire ahead.

Advancing with more awareness of his surroundings now, Molat reached the embankment and the barrier fence — now flattened by both the enemy tanks and Lurn's forces — and climbed it cautiously to take in the view.

Infantry — quite obviously belonging to the Underground — were attacking the now poorly defended compound. The fighting around the ponds and grape trees was fierce and without quarter, bodies were strewn everywhere like some new and grizzly harvest, and the fire of rail-guns and pulse-rifles was rapidly turning sheds, trees, fences, agricultural vehicles, and people into an evenly mixed morass of wood splinters, metal and plastic fragments, raw earth and shreds of flesh. Lowering himself back out of sight, Molat looked back the way he had come. In his aug he searched for the direct address of Lurn's aug, and sent:

"Lurn, ground forces are taking the compound."

By the tone of Lurn's reply, it became evident the man had other concerns:

"Well, that's real surprising fucking news."

Molat went on:

"Surely the compound is more important than a few tanks."

Lurn relented a little:

"Same problem at Cyprian compound, only they're closer to us now. I'm going to join up with Colas, who has also been out chasing tanks, and together we're going to hit the infantry that's attacking there."

"Agatha compound?" Molat asked.

"May be considered a write-off until new forces come down from Charity. My advice to you is for you to get as many of your people out of there as you can, and head over here."

Molat did not bother taking another look over the bank, but quickly turned back into the flute grass. A few hundred metres in, he came upon three corpses — one of whom he vaguely recognized — wearing army fatigues, and from these obtained a working rail-gun and a knapsack of magazines, a rations pack, and a jacket not too filthy with mud and blood. He was morbidly probing from his aug through to theirs and finding only ghostly networks that were breaking apart as the biotech augs died on their hosts, when someone came crashing through the grass towards him. He turned and fired in that direction.

"No! No! I'm unarmed! I give up!" someone shouted.

"Come forward, Toris," Molat sent.

There was a long silence, then Proctor Toris stumped out into the open, aware that because of the aug connection he could not deny his presence. Molat studied the man: he was short and fat and always seemed to be sweating, even now in a temperature that was not many degrees above zero. Molat gestured to the three corpses.

"Take whatever you need. We're walking to Cyprian compound," he said.

Toris had found himself a working hand laser, and was studying it speculatively, when a huge explosion bucked the ground beneath their feet. Gazing in the direction of Cyprian compound, Molat observed a column of smoke belching into the air and immediately felt a horrible wrenching through his aug — a sudden distancing and almost painful loneliness, as if he had been in a room full of friends and suddenly been instantly dragged many kilometres away.

"May God have mercy on them," he murmured.

Molat knew that you could hardly feel one death through the aug network, unless it was that of a close friend, but he had just felt thousands die. He turned to Toris.

"Best collect their oxygen bottles. I think we may have to walk a bit further."

"Amen," concluded Toris aloud, though Molat was not sure to what.

"The plan is for us to head for the city now — we're needed to hit the old defences," said Uris.

"Yeah," replied Carl, staring out at the mayhem the mines had wrought upon the Theocracy forces from both the Cyprian and Agatha compounds. It seemed not one square metre of the churned ground did not have human body parts randomly commingled. "We won't be able to go into the city itself, though, unless she wants us to abandon the tanks first."

Uris replied, "About half the infantry will be going in to take the city after we've knocked out its defences — the rest of them will stay out here to secure the compounds and organize the distribution of ajectant amongst the workers."

Carl engaged the drive of the tank and took it around a blackened APC, out of which he had earlier seen two soldiers stagger, their clothing on fire until the lack of oxygen outside their vehicle extinguished the flames. The two had by then suffocated.

"What about the initial attack there… on the city?" Beckle asked, not taking his face away from his targeting visor.

Carl glanced over at Uris. "Anything on that?"

Uris merely shook his head, so Carl opened his direct channel to Lellan's control room and asked the same question. It was Lellan herself who replied with, "Heavy resistance, Carl. Apparently Deacon Clotus pulled in all the roving forces as soon as Dragon trashed the arrays, and those forces are now screwed in to the old fortifications."

"They care so much about their people in the city?" Carl inquired sarcastically.

"They care about the spaceport, I think," Lellan replied.

"What losses there?"

"We lost five tanks to some big launchers Clotus had set up."

"Now?" asked Carl, as he drove the tank up beside a stand of new flute grass and noted, on the radar traces transferred from Uris's console, that other tanks from other attack points were now converging on his own.

"Most of the launchers are down, apparently, but there are still snipers with rail-guns stuck in the old bastions — like scole leaves, as Polas puts it," Lellan replied.

Carl succinctly relayed this information to his crew.

"Still seems too easy," remarked Beckle, pushing his targeting visor away from his face and glancing tiredly towards Carl.

"It is," said Carl, his face without expression. "All bets changed once the arrays went down." He now stared down at the screen to which Uris was relaying all command signals. "If it makes you feel any better, Polas is keeping me updated on the situation up above: the fleet is now on its way, with forces embarked from Charily, so it seems likely we'll have a whole rush of Theocracy troops up our arses any day now."

Into the short silence that followed this announcement Uris interjected, "Then we need to take the spaceport as soon as possible."

"Yes," agreed Carl. "If they can bring down their mu-class ships, then they'll be able to offload heavy armour. Without the port they'll have to use the landers and infantry, and they'll have to come down on the plains, as there aren't enough clear areas around here to land on."

"It'll get bloody," said Paul.

Thinking of the carnage they had so recently wrought, Carl said, "What do you mean, get?"

The sun sank close beside Calypse, bouncing light off the gas giant in a brief flood that turned the landscape golden. Within half an hour this odd light was fading, and now the clouds along the horizon, behind which both planet and sun were sinking, had the appearance of stretched marshmallows in pastel shades of green, blue, and red against a rusty orange sky.

"It's because of the dust and smoke," said Cormac. "Pollution makes for the best sunsets."

Apis only half heard what the agent was saying, as pain and anger sat inside him hand in glove, clenched in a fist around his insides — or perhaps the physical pain he felt was due to the constant drag of gravity, of being confined here in this dark well. After all, the words 'My mother is dead' seemed to have no real meaning at all, along with phrases like Miranda has been destroyed… I am the only survivor from the supposed rescue ship, which was in turn destroyed by Dragon… I killed twenty-three of my fellow survivors because they would have killed me… the AI dreadnought that then rescued me has been hijacked by a Separatist madman wielding the technology of a five-million-year-dead race — the same technology that is now keeping me alive in gravity that would otherwise kill me.

"How are you doing?" Mika suddenly asked him.

Apis glanced at her. By what he had learnt from Cormac and Gant, the ability to ask questions was something she had only recently acquired, and he could see that just asking a question was an end in itself for her. It was not as if she required any specific answer — the nanomycelium growing in the tissues of his body, which it was currently rebuilding, monitored him at a level far beyond that even of an autodoc; and, as far as he understood, transmitted reports to this suit's CPU which in turn conveyed the information to Mika's laptop.

"I'm alive," replied Apis.

Mika's expression showed some confusion for a moment, then she turned away to observe the other members of their party as they trudged through flute grass that had been grazed down to ankle height. It occurred to him that though Mika was learning to ask questions, she had yet to discover what to do with the answers — it seemed that whole new landscapes of conversation were opening up for her, and that she was still agoraphobic in that respect.

He decided to ask a question himself, more to ease her discomfort than because he wanted answers. At an intellectual level he knew that he should have answers and knowledge of all that was occurring, but on an emotional level he just did not care.

"What makes this Jain nanotechnology you are using better than the Polity version?" he asked her.

Mika turned back to him with her expression relaxing into the comfortable superiority of the didact. "Besides their basic nanomachine units being as far in advance of our own as the AGC is to a horse and cart, it is the structural nanotechnology that is so… useful. The technology employs nanomycelia, which enables a powerful support structure for the machines at the business end, and almost instant communication between machines. Essentially it is the linking together of disparate machines: it is the organization. A useful analogy would be in the building of a city. With our technology, it would be as if you had sent in a thousand stonemasons each with blueprints and the tools to do the job. The masons would do the job, but get in each other's way, repeat tasks, and make outright mistakes because of the ensuing chaos. Jain nanotechnology is more hierarchical: every unit knows its place, its job, and all inefficiencies are therefore wiped out."

"Jain technology is social, then," he said.

Mika appraised him wonderingly. "Yes, you're right. You're absolutely right."

Apis went on, "Perhaps a better view of your masons, in Jain terms, would be them standing on each other's shoulders, passing up tools and stone to build the castle."

"Yes, that is indeed a simplification of the mycelial structures now being built inside you." She glanced at her laptop. "Within two solstan days you will no longer require that suit. Using Polity tech, a similar result could only be obtained in about a month — and you would have spent most of that same month in a tank, along with the nanites, monitored by AI."

"Jain tech is self-monitoring then?"

"Yes, it is," Mika replied, slightly puzzled.

"Does it have inbuilt AI then?"

Mika had no further reply, and Apis noted her expression of worried fascination. That she had not foreseen the possibilities was perhaps some facet of her inability to ask questions. That none of them had understood what Dragon had meant when saying of the Jain, 'It is not they any more… it is not a race', he put down to the fact that they had all been under quite a lot of pressure recently, and that they did not have the Jain growing inside them, like he did.

Skellor gazed down upon the sulphurous moonlet with a vastness of comprehension that was almost godlike, but still with the pettiness of human drives — anger, hate, power-lust — and felt a hint of disappointment when the first missile punched down through its surface. There seemed to be no satisfaction in destroying the inanimate, no satisfaction in destroying something that could not appreciate its own doom, nor feel pain or terror. The second, third and fourth missiles then punched into the moonlet, evenly spaced around its equator, timed to impact to its spin, so they struck all four quarters. The explosions that followed collapsed thousands of square kilometres of surface and raised vast clouds of dust in shades of yellow and chocolate brown that were dragged round in orbital streamers to obscure from the normal human eye much of what followed. Skellor's breadth of vision encompassed nearly every emitted radiation, though, and he enjoyed a grandstand view of the destruction he had wrought.

Each collapsed area was flooded through rapidly opening fumaroles and soon became a lake of molten rock. From these lakes, huge crevasses opened in the surface and spread, separating mountain ranges and swallowing them, turning frozen plains of sulphur into boiling seas, and finally joining in a network that spread across the entire surface. At this point the fifth missile struck and tore the moonlet apart: here an asteroid fifty kilometres long trailing streamers of molten rock, its cold face what had once been a range of mountains; there a vast sheet of sulphurous fire separating out into smaller spheres cooling into something like black glass; an incandescent cloud of gas spreading, turning, already moving — dragging back into the shape of an accretion disc.

Skellor observed all this with the eye of a physicist, before sending out the Occam's grabships in search of suitable chunks of debris. Like wolves cutting through herds of great brown buffalo they sped, selecting the calf-sized chunks to clamp onto and drag back. Whilst this was happening Skellor inwardly focused his attention.

He was all-encompassing, but all his systems did not yet operate to perfection — there was much he still needed to do, and soon he would have the material for the job of extending and expanding the Jain architecture of the ship. Through this architecture he would gain absolute control of all the ship's distant systems, and perhaps enough control to be able to still the intimate mutterings of what remained of the minds of his command crew, or rather have sufficient control that such things were no bother to him. Suddenly overcome with curiosity about the functioning of minds from which he was quickly becoming alienated, he studied their… output.

Danny's mind revealed only a low instinctual mutter related to sex and the urge to procreate — something that always functioned most strongly when extinction was close. The man controlling the U-space engines — Skellor did not know his name as that had been something erased as irrelevant — was listening to music as if on a looped tape. Linking through to a library on the Occam, which he had only recently subsumed, he identified the tune as a Mozart clarinet concerto — not the usual easy listening indulged in by a Separatist fighter out of Cheyne III. The mutter from Aphran's mind was something of a duologue — a parody of the madwoman speaking to herself.

"There's a limit, there's always a limit. Go beyond this point and the technology you acquire from the enemy shafts you, and you become the enemy."

"But it wasn't acquired from the enemy, it was acquired from wonderful Skellor whom I love who acquired it from the artefacts of a dead race."

"Don't matter, there's still a limit: rail-guns are okay, but anything that starts to think for itself is dodgy. AI is the limit. Jain stuff is AI — almost alive. No, no further."

"What about Mr Crane? He thought for himself, and he nearly creamed that bastard Cormac."

"Unstable and dangerous. How many of our own did he kill?"

Skellor's curiosity was further piqued, and he immediately raided Aphran's mind for all information concerning this Mr Crane. In half a second he had all she knew. Encased in Jain architecture, he snorted derisively. "A brass metalskin Golem — a simple machine like that," he said aloud.

"Yeah, and how much closer did you get with Jain tech and a fucking delta-class dreadnought?" said one of the two Aphrans.

The other one tried to drown this with, "I love you I love you I love you Skellor!"

This didn't stop him finding the best way of hurting… both of her, and this was more satisfying to him than destroying a moonlet.